Sunday 22 November 2015

Power Relations on Facebook

Hermans article “Production, Consumption and Labor in the Social Media Mode of Communication and Production” discusses how pervasive Facebook has become as a social networking site in terms of being one of the dominant modalities of reoccurring communication; it operates as a mode of making meaning through communication and a platform that makes money through production.
Our ability to communicate with others and socialize, presents us with the risk of forgetting about power relations that determine whose property and communication is to command.

Facebook’s Terms of Service for Confirmation:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works, and distribute any User Content [remotely related to you].

This passage is from Facebook's Terms of Service, stating that they collect the records of users actions while using their platform, with this knowledge; does this discourage you from using Facebook or social media in general? There are alternate social media platforms, which do not store the records of users, why do you believe that users are mainly active on Facebook instead?

1 comment:

  1. Yes I will continue to use Facebook because of the platform it has established. Although there are other social media sites that are similar to Facebook that do not store my records; more than one billion people are on Facebook. Facebook is available for us to make money off of it as well. We can create a Facebook page for a brand or product for free which is available for anyone to see it (free marketing). I believe people still use Facebook because it was an innovational website that a lot of people started using. It does not make sense for people to start using a new social network that does the same thing as Facebook because not as many people would be on that social network which would defeat the purpose.

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